Monday October 29th 2001
Involved as my country is in “The War Against Terrorism” (does Mr Bush know that its acronym is “T.W.A.T.”?), I myself am concerned with “The Waugh Against Terrorism”. Swanning around, dressed like a character from “Brideshead Revisited” may not be the most obvious route to surviving and staying happy while all around is misery, death and fear, but it is a Pretty Good Start. I’m fighting against the atrocities of World Trainer Culture.
I’m not entirely joking. Given that there’s little you can do to prevent most of the rest of the world hurting each other (if Mr Bono has failed to do so, how can you?), the one world you can do something about is your own. Like Mr Jackson says, you have to start with The Man In The Compact Mirror. Only I would add, that’s where you should also stop. The world won’t thank you for your endless work for children’s charities: it will only assume the worst about your intentions towards the children themselves. His fellow Motown star Mr Gaye should have sung “The World Is Like a Great Big Ingrate”.
Unlike Mr Jackson, I can’t yet afford plastic surgery to make myself resemble an angular Manga cartoon creature of a different race, gender, and species to the being I started life as. Though it is on my “To Do” list.
However, I can afford make up, hair bleach and old suits to feed my lust for my own powdered appropriation of the Waugh Effort.
I also have this personal rule of not going to concerts where the performers appear less glamorous than I am. It’s not been easy.
I had to walk out of the Divine Comedy’s recent gig at Brixton Academy: Mr Hannon’s long hair and scruffy rocker shirt was too much for me, especially after years of seeing he and his band dressed immaculately in suits and short hair. What’s gone wrong? But the rest of the audience seemed happy enough. They were happy with his trainers, and they were happy with their trainers too.
Modern Trainers. The Default Shoe. I railed against them on a music discussion board on the web recently, and I was received with so much venom and personal abuse that I may as well have been recruiting for the BNP. People really love their trainers. It’s so sad.
Let me say it again, then. RUNNING SHOES ARE FOR RUNNING IN. NOT FOR PLAYING GUITAR IN.
This then, is one of the few remaining taboos in music. You can wear make-up with long gothic hair, or a dress, onstage at Reading, wield a chainsaw and an ice hockey mask, and you are perfectly acceptable. But wear make-up with short hair and a suit… and have a ban on band members wearing trainers…. and out come the burning crosses of Indiepop and Indierock for Mr Edwards. No wonder Fosca rarely get offered support slots from other bands in the UK. Our image as pop pariahs isn’t a pose: we really are outcasts in our own land. It must be the lack of trainers.
Trainers control the world. But they don’t control my world. Therefore, I win.
Still, at least Sweden seems to have “gotten” Fosca more than the UK has. Maybe it’s for the same sort of reason that the hotel TV in Linköping showed adverts for the new Leonard Cohen album (his first in nine years), while in the UK you’d be forgiven for not knowing it was out at all. I’m not saying I’m akin to a blond Cohen fronting Abba…. but as tenuously deduced comparisons go, again, it’s a Pretty Good Start.
As it is, I thoroughly enjoyed myself on Fosca’s first Swedish tour. The Swedish audiences appeared to worship me as a Norse God. Which was an aspect of myself I’d only hitherto suspected.
As far as boosting one’s self-belief goes, there’s nothing like hundreds of people in Stockholm’s equivalent of the Royal Festival Hall effectively telling you that you were right all along. I highly recommend it.
The Swedish tour was entirely organised at the behest of Swedish fanzines and fans of the group. No managers, no agents, no music industry types at all. We went because we were invited.
I far prefer this rather than have to organise concerts myself. But now I am back in London, where I am known on the hipster gigging scene chiefly, if it all, for being unpopular. Mr Haynes wants me to hustle for new Fosca gigs in London to keep people aware of the group and the records, but I’ve never been very good at phoning strangers up and demanding they book me, grovelling, pleading, trying anything to convince them that people will come if they do so. I’m far too passive. And I’m never certain that anyone will come. It’s a deadly circle. To gain a loyal London “fanbase”, Fosca have to play concerts, but to book concerts I have to convince promoters that we have a fanbase. My life is tragic enough with people I like failing to return my phone calls, let alone gig promoters too. O misere…
This, then, is the spirit in which you find me.
